Land of the lubbers: Coastal Alabama's toxic, grasshopper-like lubbers reminiscent of Biblical plagues

MOBILE, Alabama -- It’s high summer, and a creeping wave of lubbers is marching across the land eating everything in sight.

Present in seemingly uncountable numbers, the annual appearance of swarms of giant grasshopper relatives in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and along the edges of the Causeway each August brings to mind biblical accounts of locust plagues.

View full sizeDozens of baby lubbers, a close relative of grasshoppers, crawl across a dried palmetto frond on a shellmound in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Hatching out in March and April, the babies gorge on anything green through the spring and summer without fear of predators thanks to toxic compounds in their bodies. By August, the large adults, up to four inches long, are mowing their way across the Delta and through Alabama gardens like a giant eating machine. (Ben Raines, Press-Register)

Hatching out in March or early April, millions of lubbers gorge themselves for months on spring’s fresh greenery.

By the heat of the summer, they have grown exponentially, from the size of a grain of rice to monsters nearly 4 inches long. Around Mobile, lubbers tend to be a glossy black, with distinctive red or yellow piping running along the legs, head, and abdomen.

In a neat trick of nature, the adults are believed to focus their diets on certain plants that render their plump bodies poisonous to predators.

“You wonder why are they black if they are sitting on green vegetation all the time,” said John McCreadie, a University of South Alabama entomologist, discussing the showy coloration of the lubbers. “They are advertising the fact that they are toxic. They are saying if you eat me, you are eating poison.”

Fish, birds, and mammals all tend to avoid lubbers, McCreadie said. And there are even accounts of animals that have mistakenly eaten them vomiting the carcasses back up.

Unlike most grasshoppers, lubbers can’t fly. They possess stubby little wings, much too small to lift their fat bodies off the ground. In fact, their spindly legs are too small even for hopping.

“The wings are used more for displays between males and females. And they are really clumsy. It’s probably the result of the fact that they are not good to eat. They really don’t need to move to much,” McCreadie said. “The males spend an inordinate amount of time mating. They are very aggressive maters.”

The population typically hits a peak around August, with all of the adults dead by October. Many of the adults fall victim to a parasitic fly. The flies lay eggs in the bodies of the adults, which then hatch out.

“When the fly maggots hatch, they will actually eat the lubber from the inside out,” McCreadie said.

A number of companies raise lubbers by the thousands each year. The lubbers are a favorite subject for dissection in introductory biology classes.

A shop in New York specializing in fossils and taxidermy sells mounted lubbers as curios. Each lubber comes with a label bearing the scientific name, Romalea guttata. Underneath that, the home location for the animals is listed as Alabama.